View full sizeFamily photoEileen and Brendan Caver, parents of Emma and Tim, are trying to put their life back together after getting ambushed by intramural battles and dysfunction at Syracuse's City Hall.

Eileen and Brendan Caver, who are married with two young children, gave up good jobs as attorneys in Illinois to come work for the city of Syracuse.

But thanks to turmoil and miscommunication at City Hall, they no longer have jobs — in Syracuse or in Illinois.

The Cavers both received letters dated July 18 confirming they had been hired to $55,000-a-year jobs as lawyers in the city corporation counsel’s office. Eager to live closer to Eileen’s family in Central New York, they quit their jobs in Rockford, Ill.

The couple last week packed up the kids — ages 1 and 3 — and drove two days and 780 miles to Syracuse to look at rental houses. Then they drove two days back.

They put their house in Rockford on the market. They canceled their contract with the day-care provider. They started packing and gave the moving company a deposit.

The mayor “revoked both of our offers over the phone,” Brendan Caver said.

Miner told him the “offers of employment were not valid because the corporation counsel had neither the authority nor the funding for either position,” he said.

The Cavers were stunned. Neither can return to the old job.

Brendan’s last day was Friday at the Winnebago County state’s attorney office, where he had been a prosecutor for four years.

Eileen will continue working as a law clerk for U.S. District Judge Frederick Kapala until September, when her replacement will start work. Caver has worked for Kapala six years.

They’re not sure what they will do next.

“We’re still reeling,” Eileen Caver said.

“This ruined our life here as we know it,” her husband said.

The disappointment might not end with the Cavers. Perez Williams said she recently hired two Syracuse-area attorneys, who were scheduled to start work in August.

In an interview Friday, Miner would not comment on whether she had rescinded other job offers made by Perez Williams. But Brendan Caver said that’s what Miner implied.

“She said we weren’t the only people this had happened to,” he said.

Miner said there was nothing about the Cavers’ backgrounds or abilities that prompted her to stop their hiring. She did so, she said, only because the internal analysis that goes into hiring city employees had not been completed.

“There’s a process it goes through, and that entire process did not happen,” Miner said. “I don’t know what the plans were, I don’t know how the funding was, I don’t know how the work load was going to be divided. In any hire that we make, those are all questions that we answer in advance.”

Miner said she learned of the hirings only after Perez Williams quit.

But Perez Williams said Miner’s chief of staff, Bill Ryan, gave her a verbal go-ahead weeks ago to hire the couple. Perez Williams, who reported to Ryan, said she always got permission from the mayor’s office before hiring anyone.

“Bill Ryan made it clear that (Miner) knew and had approved,” Perez Williams said. “It was clear as crystal that we had approval to do this.”

Ryan said it was not clear at all.

“Juanita and I did have a couple of conversations regarding these people, including how did we feel about hiring a husband-and-wife team,” he said. “We talked about all those things. But the fact is that the vetting process was not complete, in terms of where were we going to get the money to pay for them.”

As evidence, Ryan cited an email he received from the city budget office July 25 — the day Perez Williams quit. In the email, budget analyst Rob Sprague asked whether Ryan intended to move forward with several personnel changes, including hiring four new attorneys and eliminating four other positions to pay for it. Ryan said the Cavers were among the four attorneys in question.

“I am writing in order to receive permission to move forward with the personnel changes that you have discussed with Juanita,” said the email, which Ryan provided after blacking out the employee names. “Please let me know if you would like to move forward with these changes.”

Perez Williams said Sprague’s request was a formality to allow the budget office to change the law department’s roster. The fact that Sprague made the request shows that the budget could accommodate the changes, which amounted to replacing employees who had left, she said.

“I knew what these two individuals were going to go through to get to Syracuse,” she said of the Cavers. “No one would have made that offer without the proper authority.”

Before Ryan joined Miner’s staff in January, Perez Williams reported directly to the mayor, she said. Afterward, she had to go through Ryan to get to the mayor, she said.

“From the time Bill Ryan arrived, my relationship with the administration took a very large change,” said Perez Williams, whose resignation was surrounded by mystery. “It became, really, the reason I departed.”

Eileen Murphy Caver, 31, attended high school at Rome Free Academy and went on to LeMoyne College, from which she graduated summa cum laude in 2001. She attended law school at Loyola University, in Chicago, where she met Brendan, 31, who grew up in Illinois.

Eileen Caver said she feels great loyalty to her employer, Judge Kapala, but she and Brendan this year started looking for jobs in the Syracuse area in hopes of moving closer to her family.

When Eileen’s resume landed at the corporation counsel office in May, it attracted notice. Caver interviewed June 3 with Perez Williams and another lawyer from the office, Jessica McKee. On June 13, Perez Williams called to offer her a job, according to email records.

Caver, who earns $93,000 in her federal law clerk job, did not accept right away. By late June, Brendan still had not located work in the Syracuse area. Eileen contacted Perez Williams to say that she would have to decline the offer for financial reasons.

Perez Williams then asked Caver to have Brendan send in his resume.

On July 7, while Perez Williams was on vacation in California, she conducted a 75-minute telephone interview with Brendan, with McKee listening in from Syracuse. They discussed a job for Brendan as a litigator who would focus on school district matters and other work.

On July 18, Perez Williams sent letters to both Cavers verifying that they had been hired and would start work in August.